January 2020
25th Annual LIDS Student Conference
32-141
Welcome to the 24th annual LIDS Student Conference! The annual LIDS student conference provides an opportunity for graduate students to present their research to peers as well as to the community at large. The conference will be held on January 29 – 30, at MIT's Stata Center Rooms 32-141.
Find out more »November 2018
Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall
Margaret Roberts (UC San Diego)
32-141
Abstract: As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be ineffective because they are easily thwarted and evaded by savvy Internet users. In Censored, Margaret Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent can still be enormously effective. Taking advantage of digital data harvested from the Chinese Internet and leaks from China's Propaganda Department, this book sheds light on how and when censorship influences the Chinese…
Find out more »Functional Representation of Random variables and Applications
Abbas El Gamal (Stanford University)
32-141
The functional representation lemma says that given random variables X and Y, there exists a random variable Z, independent of X, and a function g(x,z) such that Y=g(X,Z). This lemma has had several applications in information theory aimed at simplifying computations of certain information functional. I will present a strengthened version of this lemma and applications to several one-shot coding problems. The first application is to channel simulation with common randomness, where we obtain an improved bound on the achievable…
Find out more »October 2018
Can machine learning survive the artificial intelligence revolution?
Francis Bach (INRIA)
32-141
Abstract: Data and algorithms are ubiquitous in all scientific, industrial and personal domains. Data now come in multiple forms (text, image, video, web, sensors, etc.), are massive, and require more and more complex processing beyond their mere indexation or the computation of simple statistics, such as recognizing objects in images or translating texts. For all of these tasks, commonly referred to as artificial intelligence (AI), significant recent progress has allowed algorithms to reach performances that were deemed unreachable a…
Find out more »September 2018
Text as Data in Social Science: Discovery, Measurement and Causal Inference
Brandon Stewart (Princeton University)
32-141
Social scientists are increasingly turning to computer-assisted text analysis as a way of understanding the digital footprints left by communities and individuals. Much of the technology that powers these approaches is borrowed from the fields of computer science and statistics; yet, social scientists have substantially different goals. We focus on the development of methods that support three core tasks: discovery, measurement and causal inference with text. We introduce the Structural Topic Model (STM), a bayesian generative model of text which…
Find out more »Science for Policy 2.0
Vladimír Šucha (Joint Research Centre)
32-141
We live in an increasingly polarized present, looking to a complex and uncertain future while basing our legislative decisions on systems of the past. We need the processes and structures that underpin our political decision-making to be aligned with the complexities of the 21st century. Such changes cannot be undertaken by a technocratic elite, potentially disenfranchising citizens further from their governing institutions. Rather, political institutions must seek to improve transparency, openness, and accountability. The great divide between science and policy…
Find out more »May 2018
LIDS Seminar Series – Vivek Borkar
Vivek Borkar (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay)
32-141
A Rationally Designed Biomolecular Integral Feedback Control System for Robust Gene Regulation
Mustafa Khammash ( ETH Zurich )
32-141
Abstract Humans have been influencing the DNA of plants and animals for thousands of years through selective breeding. Yet it is only over the last 3 decades or so that we have gained the ability to manipulate the DNA itself and directly alter its sequences through the modern tools of genetic engineering. This has revolutionized biotechnology and ushered in the era of synthetic biology. Among the possible applications enabled by synthetic biology is the design and engineering of feedback control…
Find out more »April 2018
LIDS Seminar Series: Jose M. F. Moura
Jose M F Moura (Carnegie Mellon University)
32-141
Finding Online Extremists in Social Networks
Tauhid Zaman (MIT)
32-141
Abstract Online extremists in social networks pose a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyber bullies who harass innocent users to terrorist organizations such as ISIS that use social networks to spread propaganda. Currently, social networks suspend the accounts of such extremists in response to user complaints, but these extremist users simply create new accounts and continue their activities. In this talk, we present a new set of operational capabilities to help authorities mitigate…
Find out more »March 2018
The Power of Multiple Samples in Generative Adversarial Networks
Sewoong Oh ( University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign )
32-141
Abstract We bring the tools from Blackwell’s seminal result on comparing two stochastic experiments from 1953, to shine a new light on a modern application of great interest: Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Binary hypothesis testing is at the center of training GANs, where a trained neural network (called a critic) determines whether a given sample is from the real data or the generated (fake) data. By jointly training the generator and the critic, the hope is that eventually, the trained…
Find out more »February 2018
Safe Learning in Robotics
Claire Tomlin ( University of California, Berkeley )
32-141
Abstract A great deal of research in recent years has focused on robot learning. In many applications, guarantees that specifications are satisfied throughout the learning process are paramount. For the safety specification, we present a controller synthesis technique based on the computation of reachable sets using optimal control. We show recent results in system decomposition to speed up this computation, and how offline computation may be used in online applications. We then present a method combining reachability with machine learning,…
Find out more »Supervisory Control of Discrete Event Systems: A Retrospective and Two Recent Results on Security and Privacy
Stephane Lafortune (University of Michigan)
32-141
Abstract Lafortune will begin with a brief retrospective of the theory of supervisory control of discrete event systems, initiated in the seminal work of Ramadge & Wonham over 30 years ago, and compare it with recent work in formal methods in control. He will then present results from his group on two problems: (i) sensor deception attacks in the supervisory control layer of a cyber-physical system; and (ii) obfuscation of system secrets by insertion of fictitious events in the output…
Find out more »May 2017
Stable Optimal Control and Semicontractive Dynamic Programming
Dimitri Bertsekas (MIT)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »April 2017
Testing properties of distributions over big domains
Ronitt Rubinfeld (MIT)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »Recent Methodological Advances in Automated Causal Discovery
Peter Spirtes (Carnegie Mellon University)
32-141
IDSS Distinguished Seminars is a monthly lecture series featuring prominent global leaders and academics sharing research in areas that include social networks, causal inference, data privacy, computational social science and other areas that are impacted by the emergence of big data.
Find out more »Data-Driven Models in Power Systems
Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Geometries of Word Embeddings
Pramod Viswanath (University of Illinois)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »A System Level Approach to Controller Synthesis
Nikolai Matni (California Institute of Technology)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Capacity via Symmetry: Extensions and Practical Consequences
Henry Pfister (Duke University)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »March 2017
Probabilistic factorizations of big tables and networks
David Dunson (Duke University)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Arguments
Gary King (Harvard University )
32-141
IDSS Distinguished Seminars is a monthly lecture series featuring prominent global leaders and academics sharing research in areas that include social networks, causal inference, data privacy, computational social science and other areas that are impacted by the emergence of big data.
Find out more »February 2017
Distributed Energy Resource Control and Network Optimization
Duncan Callaway (University of California, Berkeley)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »An Information Theoretic Perspective on the ExplorationExploitation Tradeoff
Daniel Russo (Northwestern)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »LIDS Student Conference
32-141
This a student-organized, student-run conference provides an opportunity for graduate students to present their research to peers, as well as to the community at large.
Find out more »December 2016
The Impact of Expanding Medicaid: Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment
Amy Finkelstein (MIT )
32-141
IDSS Distinguished Seminars is a monthly lecture series featuring prominent global leaders and academics sharing research in areas that include social networks, causal inference, data privacy, computational social science and other areas that are impacted by the emergence of big data.
Find out more »November 2016
Estimating High-Dimensional Autoregressive Point Processes
Rebecca Willett (University of Wisconsin – Madison)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Locality and Message Passing in Network Optimization
Patrick Rebeschini (Yale)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Interpretable prediction models for network-linked data
Liza Levina (University of Michigan)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »IDSS Distinguished Seminar
Chris Knittel (MIT )
32-141
IDSS Distinguished Seminars is a monthly lecture series featuring prominent global leaders and academics sharing research in areas that include social networks, causal inference, data privacy, computational social science and other areas that are impacted by the emergence of big data.
Find out more »Community Detection in Networks: Algorithms, Complexity, and Information Limits
Bruce Hajek (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »October 2016
Deep Submodular Functions: Learning and Applications in Data Science
Jeffrey Bilmes (University of Washington)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work
Phillip Rogaway (UC Davis)
32-141
IDSS Distinguished Seminars is a monthly lecture series featuring prominent global leaders and academics sharing research in areas that include social networks, causal inference, data privacy, computational social science and other areas that are impacted by the emergence of big data.
Find out more »Innovations for the 21st Century Electricity Grid
Arun Majumdar (Stanford University )
32-141
IDSS Distinguished Seminars is a monthly lecture series featuring prominent global leaders and academics sharing research in areas that include social networks, causal inference, data privacy, computational social science and other areas that are impacted by the emergence of big data.
Find out more »Fiber-Optic Communication via the Nonlinear Fourier Transform
Frank Kschischang (University of Toronto)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »September 2016
Optimization Problems Involving Permutations
Steve Wright (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Geometric Optimization
Suvrit Sra (MIT)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Couplings of Particle Filters
Pierre E. Jacob (Harvard University)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »January 2016
December 2015
Efficient Optimal Strategies for Universal Prediction
Peter Bartlett (University of California, Berkeley)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »Wiki Surveys: Open and Quantifiable Social Data Collection
Matthew Salganik (Princeton University)
32-141
IDSS Distinguished Seminars is a monthly lecture series featuring prominent global leaders and academics sharing research in areas that include social networks, causal inference, data privacy, computational social science and other areas that are impacted by the emergence of big data.
Find out more »Next Generation Missing Data Methodology
Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen (Harvard University)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »Learning from Geometry
Robert Calderbank (Duke University)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »November 2015
Coupling, Entropy and Costa’s Corner-Point Conjecture
Yury Polyanskiy (MIT)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Hiding the Source of a Rumor in Anonymous Messaging
Sewoong Oh (University of Illinois)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Expansion of biological pathways by integrative Genomics
Jun Liu (Harvard University)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »IDSS Distinguished Seminar
Matthew Jackson (Stanford University)
32-141
IDSS Distinguished Seminars is a monthly lecture series featuring prominent global leaders and academics sharing research in areas that include social networks, causal inference, data privacy, computational social science and other areas that are impacted by the emergence of big data.
Find out more »On a High-Dimensional Random Graph Process
Gábor Lugosi (Pompeu Fabra University)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »How to Learn Probability Without Learning
Young-Han Kim (University of California, San Diego)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »October 2015
MOCCA: a primal/dual algorithm for nonconvex composite functions with applications to CT imaging
Rina Foygel Barber (University of Chicago)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »Dynamics of Swarms and Opinions via Discrete Positive Systems
Ulrich Krause (Universität Bremen)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Ranking and Embedding From Pairwise Comparisons
Robert Nowak (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »Teaching an Old Code a New Trick
Rudi Urbanke (EPFL)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Causal Inference with Random Forests
Stefan Wager (Stanford University)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »Discovering hidden structures in complex networks
Roman Vershynin (University of Michigan)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »Applying Machine Learning in Online Revenue Management
David Simchi-Levi (MIT)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Fast algorithms and (other) min-max optimal algorithms for mixed regression
Constantine Caramanis (University of Texas at Austin)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »September 2015
Some Limitations and Possibilities Toward Data-Driven Optimization
Yaron Singer (Harvard University)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Some Fundamental Ideas for Causal Inference on Large Networks
Edo Airoldi (Harvard University)
32-141
The Stochastics and Statistics Seminar is a weekly meeting organized by the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). It consists of a series of one-hour presentations by worldwide leaders making cutting edge contributions to methodological and theoretical advances in data science. These fields include probability, statistics, optimization, and applied mathematics. The seminar also regularly features experts in applications domains such as biology or engineering. This intellectual diversity has contributed to the organic assembly of a dynamic and diverse audience articulated…
Find out more »Optimal Resource Allocation to Control Epidemic Outbreaks in Networked Population
Victor Preciado (University of Pennsylvania)
32-141
The LIDS Seminar Series features distinguished speakers in the information and decision sciences who provide an overview of a research area, as well as exciting recent progress in that area. Intended for a broad audience, seminar topics span the areas of communications, computation, control, learning, networks, probability and statistics, optimization, and signal processing.
Find out more »Making Good Policies with Bad Causal Inference: The Role of Prediction and Machine Learning
Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard University)
32-141
IDSS Distinguished Seminars is a monthly lecture series featuring prominent global leaders and academics sharing research in areas that include social networks, causal inference, data privacy, computational social science and other areas that are impacted by the emergence of big data.
Find out more »
